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Luther and the girls: Religious denomination and the female education gap in nineteenth-century Prussia

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  • Becker, Sascha O.
  • Wößmann, Ludger

Abstract

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county’s or town’s distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.

Suggested Citation

  • Becker, Sascha O. & Wößmann, Ludger, 2008. "Luther and the girls: Religious denomination and the female education gap in nineteenth-century Prussia," Munich Reprints in Economics 20256, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:lmu:muenar:20256
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    1. Sascha O. Becker & Ludger Woessmann, 2009. "Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(2), pages 531-596.
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